


zahlah

by js71



Series: Assorted Star Wars Splashes (w/Dai Bendu) [12]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Crack Fic, Dai Bendu (Star Wars), Gen, i dont even know anymore guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:02:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27594548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/js71/pseuds/js71
Summary: zahlah: (Dai Bendu) a story, something that you can learn from“This is Master Cere Junda of the Jedi Order,” the message said, showing a darker-skinned woman, hair cropped short, “And I have a message for the Sith that rule our galaxy."
Series: Assorted Star Wars Splashes (w/Dai Bendu) [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1977589
Comments: 2
Kudos: 84





	zahlah

The writing that covered the flimsi page was unfamiliar to Grey. He wasn’t much for writing, but Beat used to have a thing for it, and by design, Grey picked up more about languages and literature than he had ever wanted to. And what he learned, through Beat, was that most languages shared similarities. Several categories fit each style of written language, from pictures to numbers to swirls or sharp curves, endless lines or broken up chunks.

Grey had never seen anything like Caleb’s writing. It was curving, for the most part, forming familiar symbols, ones that reminded Grey of musical notes - Drum’s obsession - or letters from other languages. But he couldn’t pick anything out, nothing concrete, at least. The kid wrote everywhere, Grey knew. He always had a pen on him, one of those fancy ones that could mark on data-pads and flimsi. He sometimes wrote on his skin too, usually when they were in meetings of some sort. The general always frowned at him, disapproving, but it didn’t stop Caleb.

Even giving him a notebook hadn’t helped. Caleb filled it out, lost it daily, and continued to write on his clothes and hands. But now, without Caleb, and with just a notebook of writing, with a fallen lightsaber and a heavy heart, the notebook was all that Grey and Styles had.

So Grey sat down. Not in the barracks, but in the room that the two Jedi had shared. He sat down in the middle of the floor and started to comb through the book, page by page. It took weeks, then months, and finally a year, before he began to understand the basics of the language that the Jedi had used.

It was just a notebook. Filled with recipes for foods, notes from briefings, dates of birthdays and reminders about what to get who for what celebration. There were stick figure drawings in the margins, with little speech bubbles that took weeks to piece together, as it was all a sort of casual shorthand.

He didn’t work it all out. Only bits. Enough to know the idea of what each page might be. He couldn’t read every word or most of them. Just some. Enough. He hoped. He wasn’t sure.

He didn’t know.

If Caleb was alive.

If the Jedi were alive.

Until he did.

* * *

“This is Master Cere Junda of the Jedi Order,” the message said, showing a darker-skinned woman, hair cropped short, dressed in simple clothing, almost like a smuggler, but more casual, the weapon at her belt betraying the fabrics and arrangement. Her hands were folded behind her, and Grey could just about see the smirk. “And I have a message for the Sith that rule our galaxy.

“You murdered our babies as they slept, and I wonder if you are proud. You slaughtered our children, who only tried to protect their siblings, and I wonder if you even remember. You tried to erase a culture, a family, a people, and you twisted it in your favour.

“I wonder what they will say in the future. That we were the killers, that we deserved to die. That our history deserved to be erased, that our home deserved to be corrupted. That a people, a family, deserved senseless slaughter.

“We are the Jedi,” Cere said. “We may be a dying race, we may have been decimated, we may have been turned on. But we are the Je’daii Order. We are the descendants of the ancient Order of the Dai Bendu, and we were forged in the frozen wastes of Ando Prime. Our language was born of ice, our traditions of snow.

“You have killed us by the hundreds, you have slit the throats of our children and traumatized my siblings for decades to come. We have been cast out, but we have not yet been defeated, for you must understand this.

“Illum. Hoth. Ahch-To. Xenxiar. Ossus. Jedha. Others.

“We are a people. Born of ice and snow. Born of the Light of the Force. We will not go quietly. We never have, no matter how tight you hold information. Listen to me, Palpatine, the liar. Listen to me, Vader, the traitor. Listen to me, Inquisitors, the mislead. You walk the Dark, but there shall always be those who walk the Light. So long as there is the Force, there will be the Jedi.

“And we are warriors.”

* * *

Then the message shut off. The holo of a supposedly dead woman, having taken over every comm in the galaxy. Every screen, every projector, every speaker. It had to be the product of several years of work, of infiltration and planning. And there had been nothing nobody could do to cut off the message.

It was heard on Coruscant, it was heard on Naboo, it was heard by pirates and smugglers, healers and those in comas, the poor and the rich, those in power and those imprisoned. It was watched by the deaf and listened to by the blind.

It was a blatant shout to the universe. We are here, you have failed, and we are coming.

Grey had never been so glad to have his comm taken over by someone else in his life.

* * *

It started something. Reports began to come in, a trickle of them, but compared to what had been coming in, it was a flood. Grey, along with every other brother, got eyes on the reports, watched the footage, knew everything that they could know about them.

Caleb was alive, fighting with a boy with red hair and a togruta who was taller than either of them and a mirialan who was absolutely terrifying in the quietest of ways. The wrinkly green Jedi, Yoda, was kicking, cackling his way around base after base. There was a group of teenagers, who had to have been kids at Order 66, who were running around as pirates, taking a special sort of pleasure in blowing things up.

The Empire was in very quiet, very censored, chaos.

And then the hackers appeared. Bucket, Crypto, Six-Six-Liar. They were pranksters, breaking into official broadcasts and streaming videos of baby tooka’s falling over their paws and onto their faces or Jedi children reading The Very Hungry Gizka to each other with loud voices and big gestures. Sometimes, they didn’t even do that, broadcasting a live feed of a masked figure, with a robotic voice saying things like  _ palpatine eats rainbows and unicorns  _ or  _ vader wears neon pink underwear _ or whatever other stupid things they could come up with.

Then, the Empire built a giant satellite, and well, it all went viral, for lack of a better term. Or rather, an edited version of the process to blow it up went viral. It was pretty simple. The Jedi stole a ship, the Empire didn’t notice it was stolen, they flew down to Scarif. From there, they knocked out the two soldiers who came to inspect the ship and electrocuted the droid.

The rest of that was interspaced with random shots, including a one minute and six-second long take, unbroken, from the perspective of a mouse droid. The rest of the footage included such beauties as a human boy shouting _ it’s a trap _ , and a tholothian teenager, one of the pirates, smacking him over the back of the head, with a cry of  _ I told you that _ , as well as the utter bullshit of a three-minute-long montage at the end.

Said montage was continuously cut between Princess Winter of Alderan, who accepted a data-disk from a Rebel officer, with the declaration that they’d been sent hope and escaping Scarif, and said Princess blatantly lying to Darth Vader, with a Jedi in the background. Said Jedi didn’t have a lightsaber or anything that signalled she was a Jedi, besides a freeze-frame shot with a  _ ding _ sound effect, with the added effect of a neon sign identifying her as such with an arrow edited in. She was seen in the background trying very hard not to laugh.

That was just the first part, and it was twelve minutes long. The second was split in half. The first part was a breakdown of how anyone could blow up the Death Star, step by step, colour-coded and released in over a million different languages, with aids built-in so that everyone could understand. The second half was a scrolling list of reasons why to blow up the Death Star, including such gems as Because I’m Bored, The Bigger They Are The Harder They Fall, and Why the Fuck Not. It ended with a fancy shot of the Death Star getting blown to smithereens.

Grey had known for a while that the Jedi were… eccentric was a drastic understatement, but it was difficult to explain to someone who hadn’t ever met them. He was pretty sure that the galaxy was divided between laughing their asses off at the reality of the Jedi Order, or arguing that no, they weren’t Jedi making this shit, they were just Rebels trying to scare the Empire. There was also a small, online faction that was insisting that the Jedi were the evil ones, and this just showed that which Grey ignored.

But it wasn’t until a short, blue-haired kid walked right up to him one day, with a canister of spray paint, and set a hand on Grey’s shoulder. Utterly bewildered, Grey froze, and the kid took the opportunity to spray something in neon green on his armour. By the time Grey’s brain had started to work again, the kid had saluted to him, and disappeared.

Just about everyone else had the writing on their armour by the end of the day. It was on every ship, too, and tank, and on the floors, and the doors, and windows.

Turned out it said  _ old _ . Grey was partially offended, but mostly trying not to laugh himself to the floor. And it also turned out that the paint was non-removable. The Empire was wasteful, so they just threw all the vandalized materials out.

Within a week, they all had hot pink swirls again.

And then again. A different, more eye-burning colour.

And then again.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](https://js71.tumblr.com/post/624273937698865152/submit-requests)!


End file.
